Post Mortem of Hero DAO

The few remaining active members of HeroDAO have collectively decided to pause operations for the time being.

HeroDAO started as a radical experiment: Can you create an IP franchise that is owned by its fans? The DAO was summoned at 4:20 on March 10th, 2021.

Successes:

• A true DAO structure with 40 share holding, voting, contributing members.
• A real physical comic book: Moon Girl #1
• $15,000 raised and distributed to artists around the world to create content for our hero franchise

Failures:

• Getting enough attention to make fundraising sustainable or build any semblance of an audience
• Sustainably attracting talent and focus for projects
• Consistent project management
• MR token was never listed anywhere, nor captured attention

Why did it fail?

1. We failed to build a significant enough audience during the previous bull run to survive the end of it.

None of our content was compelling or consistent enough to build a large enough audience and generate the excitement needed for a successful brand. We hosted dozens of twitter spaces, but attendance was small. We tried offering POAPs for completing onboarding or attending townhalls, but were spammed by bots. We attended several web3 or comics related events but were given speaking times during opening ceremonies twice (weird coincidence) and had barely any attendance at in person events. Our efforts were not focused enough, and we did too little too late.

2. We failed to create meaningful ecosystem allies or partners, or break through the noise.

Despite aidroping $1M worth of MoonRock token to participants of similar web3+comics related projects with the goal of capturing enough attention to recruit more contributors. The leaders at The Greatest Larp, MetaGame, & Punks Comic refused to help us publicize our legitimate airdrop and we found it extremely hard to break through the noise. Many people who found out about it did not claim because they thought it could be a scam. Nearly everyone who did claim the airdrop immediately completely dumped it. More than 85% went unclaimed.

3. We failed to learn fast enough that 10 people working on business development, project management, recruiting etc for 4 hours a week each accomplish far less than 1 person working on it 40 hours a week.

While the DAO was not without direction and leadership, the time between rounds of script edits, back and forths with artists, marketing plans, blog approvals, etc. was constantly longer than it should have been. We did not move fast enough to create our comic and other content, nor put enough man-hours into HeroDAO. There was no one working full-time for the DAO, for example.

4. Onboarding User Experience sucked, which made retaining contributors and adding new ones poor.

To join the DAO we required learning metamask, switching to gnosis chain, getting dai->xdai->wxdai, figuring out the dao haus interface, and more. There were too many technical whoops to jump through and not enough directions or tasks for would-be contributors to pick up when they joined.

Key Take Aways
HeroDAO is still a great idea, and will likely be back someday
We built something cool, getting other people
Moon Girl #1 is a super rare comic now

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For MR holders and DAO contributors:
Over the coming days, we will be printing the only run of Moon Girl #1 comics. Anyone in the DAO who wants a copy can have one. After that time, any money in gnosis safes owned by the DAO will be returned to the treasury. Then members are free to ragequit their shares into a pro rata amount of the value in the treasury, effectively returning economic stake to participants. I highly suggest removing any MR liquidity you have soon.

Any money left in the treasury will go to future Hero DAO ops if the project is ever revived.